"My own view which may not be fully accepted by everybody is that once you formulate a protest in terms of principle, you have to; firstly.. you can never formulate a protest only in terms of interests. You can never say I am being oppressed; you have to say oppression is wrong. That’s the only way you can formulate a protest. The moment you do that, the principle becomes universal. Not universal in the sense of 100% universal, but it finds for itself a class which goes beyond you. Then what happens is that, you will have to speak for many more people, which again has its own further consequences. So a perpetual expansion of the principled concerns is unavoidable in the very fact that a protest has to be expressed in terms of universal values. So once we say that torture is wrong, it is impossible for civil rights movement to say torture of Naxalites is wrong. You have to say torture is wrong. Once you say torture is wrong you have to look at who else is being tortured. So we had to look. ..................... So any new person who feels threatened by police, the only advice we give is, persevere. After a while they’ll think, there is no point in harassing this fellow, they will give up. That’s what happened to us, you also achieve that status. There is no other way one can help. That is the only advice we can give. And it works. One can say it is commitment, this, that. It is never so. Ultimately it’s part of, when you… your responses are not part of your mind, they are part of your personality. Somebody could, in terms of ordinary kind of analysis say, I can give up this and be an ordinary lawyer. I can’t. Because if I don’t have this, I don’t live in this world. I won’t have any sense of a reality at all. I’ll lose all my touch with reality. That is my personal explanation." balagopal.org/?p=843#more-843
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 07:17:21 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015